The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Waning Days of Cheap Oil

Posted on June 9, 2010
Filed Under General Insanity |

I was hesitant at first to publish this new blog. But on the strong recommendation of my dear friend Ed Maskevich, I am moving ahead with this posting.

As I contemplate the long term affects of the BP Oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and I take into account the other critical issues with oil facing the world today, I am reminded of how I deal with rabbits here on my farm in Michigan. I have a decent garden and orchard on my farm and varmints of all types have been a problem over the years. Typically, I will shoot the varmints that threaten the garden and for years this included rabbits. But I noticed something after a time. The best I could do on the rabbit population, despite my best vigilance, was simply to keep them under control. I was never able to fully keep them out of my garden.

So I tried something new one year; I ignored them. In a couple of years, the rabbit population on my farm exploded and there were rabbits everywhere. Then one year, there were none. All the rabbits had disappeared as if by magic. Slowly they came back over the next couple of seasons and then I had another year with rabbits everywhere. It was at this stage it occurred to me what was happening. With my best efforts, I was only able to keep the local rabbit population under a minimum control. But if I left them to their own devices, they would over-populate and get some disease that would literally wipe them out for a few years. Left on their own, they would always self-destruct.

As I contemplate what we humans are doing to ourselves with oil today, I realize we are about to do the same thing as the local rabbits here on my farm. The world population is getting close to hitting 7 billion people sometime in the year 2011. Every human being born consumes some piece of world energy and resources. The primary resource consumed is oil as it is not only used for fuel, but also fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides for food production. The great human strides in being able to generate more food (in yield per acre) as well as being able to transport that food to the areas that need it is based exclusively upon cheap oil.

I put together a graph that shows world oil production compared to world population growth in billions of people.

I made a basic assumption that the oil output required to support the world population would be the same going down as it was going up. On the graph I show a blue line for world population and the projection for future growth. I show a red line for oil production based on peak oil theory from http://people.hofstra.edu. Then I show a green line to show the actual world population losses that should occur as oil availability drops off. Very simply, this shows a reduction of world population of about 3 billion people worldwide over the next 30 years.

For those who doubt peak oil theory or question if there is to be a drop off consider this latest graphic from the US Department of Energy, http://www.eia.doe.gov.

To be honest, as I think about this information, my knees get weak and my heart starts to palpitate. I expect no one of the 7 billion humans currently living on this planet will go quietly into the night. I suggest that not only is everyone going to fight for these diminishing resources, the battles in fact have already begun thus hastening the inevitable. While the USA has been fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq for lots of foolishly stated reasons, it has really always been about oil. If the USA goes to war in Iran, it will also be about oil. The reason why we stupidly risk drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico at 23,000 feet below sea level causing dramatic environmental disasters is also because of diminishing oil.

Since 1998, an estimated 5 million people have died in wars in the Congo. Yet we have no troops there and we are not trying to stop the WWII level death rates. At the same time we never hear of this war in the Main Stream Media or the western press. It is a forgotten war. Why is this? I submit because there is no oil yet found in the Congo.

As a species, I think we as humans are about to self-destruct. The environmental impact of the gulf oil disaster is at this stage immeasurable. Billions of cubic feet of methane have leaked into the atmosphere from this disaster. Meanwhile, the volcano like oil flow from the BP leak site has turned the corner around Florida and is now heading out into the Atlantic Ocean via the Gulf Stream. Cracks in the seabed around the drill site have also now formed and more oil is gushing out on top of what is coming from the destroyed BP drill pipe. This means that even if they managed to stop the one leak, these others from the ocean floor cracks will continue to do their damage. It would not surprise me if the BP oil leak was still continuing to spill oil into the ocean well into the summer of 2011 doing its ongoing damage to the lowest level of our world food chain. Add to this the fact that national economies are staggering and collapsing all around the world with no end in sight and the obvious results of all this will be more war as nations struggle to keep what is left to them.

Just like the rabbits on my farm, I think we are about to witness a massive die off. Except instead of rabbits, it will be our own demise. Three billion people have to be removed from this planet because we do not have the energy and resources to support them any longer. This demise will clearly occur in a calamitous fashion as I suspect most people will fight for life. My knees are buckling again at this thought.

When this world explodes into revolution, starvation, disease and war, our downfall will not have been caused by any conspiracy theory or master plan set in motion by elites to control the masses. It will come about due to our own stupidity and shortsightedness as a species. We have over populated ourselves and have spent our time poorly as we consumed our cheap, non-replaceable oil energy. Now time has run out and we have no good alternatives to present to save ourselves. I am fearful the evidence says the time has arrived for our own mass die off and there is nothing we can do to stop it.

Though I am not an overly religious person, a prayer comes to mind at this late juncture:
Eph 6: 13-17 Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

Clayton

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